Reviewed by Frank McKone
There’s plenty to read about Dame Lesley Lawson (née Hornby) on Wikipedia under the name “Twiggy”.
But, you need to see this documentary to understand and appreciate what her life became as Twiggy, “The Face of 1966” when she was 15 going-on 16, through to the making of this memoir.
I feel guilty now that ever since that year, viewing her instant rise to fame from colonial Sydney, she seemed no more than a shallow sparkle of superficiality. It was a mystery to me how an accidental shape could change fashion as if it really mattered.
Then as I approached viewing, I feared I would be watching nothing more than another form of commercialised or unnecessarily glorified history. After all, since my reaction back in 1966, I had never followed her career. I didn’t need to see more thin legs and over-long eyelashes.
How short-sighted I was!!
It turns out that Lesley Hornby, daughter of a practical and sensible tradesman, has never been a go-getting girl, seeking fame. That was the last thing she expected. I think, in the film, it is Dustin Hoffman who says how simply open and honest she is; while perhaps it is Charlotte Tilbury who speaks of how Twiggy is a great example of a girl growing into a woman.
I’m probably biassed the other way now, since I found her north London upbringing, though ten years after me, was in a house exactly like mine and my tradesman uncle’s semi-detached. He was practical and sensible, too.
I mustn’t give you spoilers, but I think the key to appreciating her story is in an interview on TV when she was still a teenager, now among the upper-class of modelling. She was asked “Do you feel at home among these people, since you come from a working-class background?”
Twiggy / Lesley just looked at this male interviewer, calmly, and simply said “Why not?”
She became a model, an actor, a partner, a wife, a mother, a success in many different ways – in other words a woman who says “Why not!”, and now tells her story first-hand in this documentary for the first time.
Enjoy.
